As I walked through the outpatient waiting area, I passed one of the young guys in the civilian program, I thought, communing with his smart phone. Upon reaching the nurses’ station, though, I realized my error, walked back, and for a few moments stared at the soldier unobserved, at his stocking cap with the chic, mirrored sunglasses perched thereon, sunset orange, at his technicolor tennis shoes facing no visual competition from the all-gray track suit that most likely cost a fraction of the shoes’ price, from Target, likely.

Texting completed, he looked up and smiled. “Hey!”

“Good holidays?” I asked.

Shifting to a frown that spoke volumes, “We need to talk,” he said.

Marital tensions, again. Similar ones had brought him to me only weeks ago with a near-suicide story worthy of the name. Today, though, he was only angry, willing to keep trying, but only for so much longer.

In the ensuing weeks, you see, he’d begun to forgive himself for imagined errors and real deaths. No longer was he feeling unworthy of happiness because he’d happened to have decent-enough numbers in War’s lottery.

“Diamonds Will Safeguard the Next Generation of US Soldiers,” Mashable announced on my Facebook page, assuring me, as only the “top resource” of “digital culture” can, that (at least for now) we may have the “upper hand” in the battle over our soldiers’ bodies. The subtitle said it all: “Looks like diamonds aren’t only a girl’s best friend anymore.”

I hope so.

“He was my best friend,” the soldier told me today through his tears, he who had nearly sacrificed his own life to save his buddy’s, only to find himself too late, yet right on time for the grenade that should have killed him as well.

But didn’t.

“I hear their cries, Doc,” he whispered to me, “his, the other guys’. I should have gone down with them. It’s not right, Doc, not right.”

Will War no longer penetrate soldiers now, sixty years after Marilyn cooed her way through that bevy of tuxedo-clad charmers, or will otherwise gentle men (and women) prefer not blondes, but rather one more chance, please, God, to get to him, to her in time?

I keep scrolling down my Facebook page and can only pray that Hope is more than a gem in the Smithsonian or a barrier for bullets, that hope will whisper a soldier comfort tonight in the voice of his best friend.

Last year on Veteran’s Day, I posted the following. Sadly I can only add to it this year, names of veterans I have known only by their impact on others (Dr. Peter Linnerooth, Clay Hunt), names of veterans I have known deeply by their impact on me (Porthos, Ethan, Kurt) .

Yet with deepest respect, I can only say it all again. Gladly:

I’ve said it many times before: there are much easier ways to get an education than by going through boot camp, a statement as true in times of peace as in times of war. In basic training one learns—body, heart, and mind-—that one may have not only to kill, but also to die, and furthermore that one may have to do both precisely because one is not the center of the universe, because one has chosen to become part of a group that has volunteered to defend a larger group from those who would harm the innocent.

Some persons in this world will voluntarily choose martyrdom to promote the cause of peace, i.e., will choose their own deaths rather than inflict death on another.

Many, if not most persons, however, feel no need whatsoever to make a similar choice. Those who choose to serve in the military take up a different calling, therefore: they choose to serve the “many” such persons, if necessary, unto death so that the innocent will not have to be forced into martyrdom–or, perhaps better put, will not have to be slaughtered.

Every veteran knows that and can look another veteran in the eye and know that the other veteran knows that as well.

And so today is November 11. Because of this blog, however, because of the men and women I have been privileged to serve, this year I remembered Veterans’ Day early, on November 4, three days after November 1, All Saints Day.

We in the Mennonite tradition are more of the “Low Church” ilk, meaning that we have, through our history, tended not to take much notice of such “High Church” occasions as Advent, Lent, Epiphany, etc. At our Indianapolis congregation, however, we have for several years now chosen the Sunday after All Saints Day to remember those in our congregation and in our lives who have, in the words of the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, joined our “great . . . cloud of witnesses.”

In recent years we have done so in a visually striking way: at the front of the sanctuary, on a table before the pulpit, small, flat votive candles are floated in glass bowls filled with water. Initially, as a member of our pastoral staff reads off the names of all members of the congregation who have died during our church’s nearly sixty years of existence, another staff member lights a candle as each name is read. Afterwards, we in the congregation are invited to come forward as we would like to light a candle for those whom we remember and whom we honor.

This year, as the members of the congregation came up front, the rest of us sang a song from the Taizé Community of France with the words, “Within our darkest night, You kindle the fire that never dies away,” a simple melody accompanied by organ, a solo flute, and a solo violin, the congregation and the instruments performing a canon of sorts again and again until all had lit their candles.

As I sat there, four names came to my mind: Danny, TJ, Mike, and Donald, the names of the best friends of four of the men I’ve had the honor to serve. All four men died in front of the men whom I’ve come to know. All four of the men I’ve come to know pause at the mention of these names, no matter how often, no matter when.

I walked up to the table and took the long, fireplace match from the women who had been standing in front of me. The match had burned down about a third of the way, still quite afire, ready. I lowered the flame down to one of the white votives floating in the water. It bobbed ever so slightly, requiring that I hold the match steadily, right at the tip of the wick, to await the few seconds until the flame recreated itself, fire one more time symbolizing lives engulfed, spirits rekindled, light continued.

For a moment I stood there, match now burned nearly halfway down, still alighted, nonetheless, both flames, match’s and candle’s, reflecting in the water below.

I lifted the match near my lips and blew. The carbon remains fell into the water, not scattering, merely floating, remnants, reminders that none of these four men ever reached his twenty-second birthday.

It was time to go back to my seat. Others were awaiting their turn. Death waits for no one.

Tonight I see that floating candle in my mind. Yet on this Veterans’ Day I also recall that life waits for no one as well. The dead float in our souls not simply to be remembered, but even more to be revived, reborn, remade. Life goes on for each of the men whom I continue to serve. Danny’s buddy struggles to keep his emotions under control long enough to feel a future. TJ’s buddy is coming closer every day to accepting that he must take time to grieve so that he will find the time to rebuild. Mike’s buddy is taking that time even as we speak. And Donald’s buddy finally got his old job back.

Thankfully, though death and life do not, hope waits for us all.

If we only dare hope that it will.

To Danny, TJ, Mike, Donald, and now well over two thousand men and women from OEF/OIF/OND, I say “thank you.” To my Uncle Raymond and those who died in Europe and the South Pacific over half a century ago, I say “thank you.” To the best buddy of Danny’s father and those who died with him in Southeast Asia now almost a half century ago, I say “thank you.”

And to all of you who survive, “thank you.” No matter whether one agrees with the wisdom of violence, we all agree to its existence, and on this day that was supposed to have marked the end of the “War to End All Wars,” I thank those who wish to find meaning in protection, even protection unto death. War may or may not ever be justified, ever be wise. War is never a good. Yet its end has not come, nor, sadly, will it.

Thank you to all those who have been and are still willing to live faithfully in light of that.

I got out of Nashville quite late this past Monday, so I was heading into a long trip up I-65. It turned out not too badly, though, all said and done. Eastside Indianapolis should probably be farther than four-ish hours away from Northside Nashville, but the weather was great, the truckers were anything but reserved in their speed, and I was listening to interesting ideas about trauma and the brain (spare me what you’re thinking), so the destination was achieved with minimal consternation: my first time back to Indy since the move this summer, a quick one, in and out, for a conference at which I presented on Wednesday. I’d planned on keeping a low profile, hoping to catch up on dictations (thanks to the miracle of Citrix and an iPad) in quiet, quiet, quiet.

Silouan had other plans, however. Not so much as to the low profile. More as to the quiet.

Great name, Silouan. Check it out on the Fount of All Knowledge, i.e., Wikipedia. Apparently it’s the Russian version for Silvanus, Latin for Silas, the companion of Saint Paul (as in “old time religion” and “good enough for Paul and Silas, good enough for me,” remember?) Middle English is Selwyn. Greek is Σιλουανος, Silouanos.

My nerdiness embarrasses my children to no end.

Silouan Green is a Marine’s Marine. Think Jethro Gibbs on NCIS, raise him up a couple of inches, replace the graying brunette with closely-cropped sandy-brown—more spare on the top, granted, but certainly no worse for the wear, trust me. He strode onto the main stage of the conference as if he were just checking on the house before heading out to the lake, blue dress shirt, open-collared, slate-gray khaki’s, flat front (what else? why waste the cloth?) His voice didn’t command attention, just claimed it.

Our Marine’s Marine grew up in small-city Indiana before heading to college down here in my new neighborhood, Vanderbilt. Math major, officer candidate school, top graduate. Getting the picture?

So what else to do other than to become a Marine pilot?

In case you’re wondering, it’s no walk in the park to become a Marine pilot.

That he did, though, très à la Gibbs, with fervor and (I have no doubt) aplomb. Fly, he did as well. Until the day his plane’s engine caught fire on take-off. And he and his fellow pilot were ejected from the aircraft. And his fellow pilot didn’t make it. And he sort of did.

To say that Silouan mesmerizes as he tells his story of trauma and recovery is to be unfair both to him and to Mesmer. In no way does he resort to the cheap parlor tricks of some reformed huckster, lulling listeners into an emotional trance with the prosody of his voice, the alliteration of his words, luring their souls onto the stage, syllable by syllable, only then to slap them to attention with an emotional zinger, a climax leading to a denouement of the audience’s tearful adoration of the bravery of this “suffering soul” who has overcome nevertheless, whether by the grace of God or the force of Will (or both).

Hardly.

Instead Silouan let me sit in my chair, body and soul, and brought himself to me. His energy, his candor, his roughness, his softness, his him: with each anecdote, each exhortation, all of it filled the room, never demanding I join it, always inviting me to. Here was a man whose military career had meant so much to him, he’d spent nine months sleeping with a loaded gun to his head, each night granting himself the option of allowing the Corps the luxury of not having to pursue his (forced) medical retirement any further. Here was a man who, through grace and through love, finally decided to give Life another chance instead.

When I got back home to Nashville, I could describe him to colleagues in only one way: an utterly disarming mixture of unabashed cockiness and true humility.

So why write of him, you ask?

First, I’m more than willing to offer him free advertising. If you’re looking for a veteran who’s suffered not only the loss of a friend, of his health, of his career, but even more the loss of his very identity, a veteran who has re-found and reformulated that identity in spite of an exhausted body and soul that had been doing what they could to thwart him, a veteran who is willing to speak to anyone who will listen about despair and hope in a way that will never leave you the same—check out www.silouan.com. Get him to come speak. Advertise well. Prepare to walk away different from how you arrived. Period.

He has also put together an excellent study guide to help traumatized individuals to re-find- and reformulate their very own identities, www.theladderupp.com. I’m planning on using it with every soldier who comes to our facility.

Even more, though, I write of him to honor his pain, to honor his continuing recovery, and to remind everyone—veteran, family member, friend, mental health professional, human—that Life can bring down even the unabashedly cocky, the competent beyond your wildest dreams, the golden boys and girls who will do what you could never hope to do better than you could have ever dreamed of doing it and that Life is nonetheless still willing to give them a humble second chance. Or three.

If Life will do that for them, it’ll do it for all of us.

Semper fidelis, the Marine’s motto, “always faithful.” Silouan is certainly that. But like most of his fellow Marines, soldiers, and the men and women of the Navy, the Air Force, and the Coast Guard, it doesn’t stop there. Semper paratus, so says the Coast Guard, “always ready”: that, too. Semper fortis, “always strong”? As much as any person can be on any given day, sure. Semper humilis, “always humble”? What if we think of the humble as those who are not so much lowly as they are grounded, down-to-earth, unafraid to look up and acknowledge something, some ones, Someone higher?

So let’s just make it easier on ourselves, shall we? Semper Silouan. Enough said.

I’m not sure that even now he fully understands the impact of his presence, this soldier, notwithstanding our having discussed it several times. Of average height and very strong build, he, to be fair, would not necessarily stand out on an Army base filled with men of such description, if all you were to do were to view him in a still pose, standing or sitting.

It’s how he moves.

I’ll never forget first seeing him walk, sit down, lean forward, fold his hands, bend his head downward. He was not the first burdened soldier I’d met, not by a long shot. Yet there was something so measured about him, so willing to accept the load, no matter how heavy. It was as if Atlas had volunteered to Zeus to bear the weight of the heavens so that no one else would be so encumbered, no hint of martyrdom anywhere, simply duty and faithfulness.

Unfortunately for him, though, he had taken on weight that had been unfairly farmed out to the innocent, whether by the questionable decisions of superiors or by Life. As a veteran of four Middle East deployments, he had had more than his share of opportunities to do that.

Only then to return home and to discover that Life does not cease to provide such opportunities once you’ve hopped a plane back stateside.

More pertinent to this tale, moreover: true to form, to his character, he was even willing to bear such a weight for me.

It was probably our second, maybe third time speaking together. Already, in just those short encounters, I had come so to admire him, even as I had also come to feel so much sadness at his recurring assumption that if someone was going to have to take the “hit” for Life’s cruelties, it might as well be him.

The conversation that day took an innocent enough turn, in retrospect, a discussion of possible future options, as I recall, tossed out as one scenario among many.

I said what I said.

He didn’t respond as he could have. As I babbled on, he simply nodded his head in that most soldierly of manner, the ever-ready “Roger that, sir,” I’m sure, right there on his lips.

It was I who had to stop in mid-sentence, smacked in the psychic face by the import of the words I had just spoken to him.

You see, I had just “tossed out” an option that would have been impossible precisely because of something that had happened to him, something about which he had felt the greatest of blame, even though there had been none for him “realistically” to take on. For a moment, I had acted as if what had most rent his heart had never happened at all. I might as well have been talking to Atlas about that oversized beach ball on his shoulders.

This was not the first time this had happened to me, of course, although fortunately a mistake of this gravity is a rare one. Once I realized my mistake, I think I must have just sat there open-mouthed, wide-eyed, the whole bit. All I can remember is his face, a single swallow, a deep breath with his mouth closed, in and out, no change in countenance whatsoever, followed by that look of being willing to take the hit one more time and then to listen attentively to whatever my next words might have been.

“Oh, my God, I’m so sorry,” was all I could utter. I then spoke my mistake out loud.

“That’s all right,” he whispered, although the quick catch in his voice revealed that it had been anything but.

“No, it’s not,” I shot back, quite aware of my need to allow him, even urge him to put blame where blame was due. “You deserve better than your doctor even momentarily forgetting what I forgot.”

His discomfort was crescendoing. “Really, sir, it’s OK. I forget things all the time. No big deal, really.”

This was a hard decision point for me. On the one hand, I needn’t—and what’s more, shouldn’t—keep harping on something that a soldier has no desire to rehash. He or she has the right to request that we just let it go, already.

Yet somehow I knew that this was not one of those times.

For a few frantic microseconds, I dove inward, trying to interrogate every neuron I possibly could: “Why did I do that?” Only one thought, more image than language, came to me: I was already experiencing him as the strong, good, fulfilled man that he could and can be. I was, in other words, already experiencing him as having moved forward.

“You know,” I finally said. “I have no clue as to whether this will make things better or worse, but I do want you to know: I think at that moment I was experiencing you as the strong man you are, even though I realize that you’re feeling anything but that. Even though I know full well that you are struggling, I still think of you, feel you as the man who I know you want to become.”

For a few seconds, he stared at me, still not angry, but less anxious as well. He then looked down and even, for an instant, smiled, more out of recognition than out of anything approaching levity.

“You know, one of the other soldiers told me that exact thing, just yesterday, that I’m exactly the kind of guy he sees himself wanting to become. It . . . it helped.”

I leaned forward.

“You appear to be having no problem forgiving me for my blunder, am I right?”

He looked back at me. “Absolutely.”

“Then, maybe,” I replied, “could you see how all the rest of us, whether alive or not, would have no problem forgiving you—if in fact there were actually something to forgive? The hardest person on you is you.”

He dropped his head back down. “It’s always been that way.”

“Do you see, then,” I went on, “how because of what just happened, we proved together at least one instance of something that you’ve doubted much of your life: that words can make a difference, that trying to work something out is more than half the answer to whatever it is that comes between two people? All your life you’ve felt that words really don’t make a difference, so just soldier on. Sure, you’ve been to War four times: so you know that’s very often the case, the only case. But it’s not always the case, especially between two people who are trying to understand each other. Good intentions may not always lead to good results, but sometimes they’re all we have—and they really are at least better than silence.”

It took only him only a few seconds to look back at me with both that same “what do you know” smile and the words that I’d been expecting all along: “Roger that, sir. Roger that.”

Gary Cooper was certainly a complex man in real life, but on the silver screen he came to stand for all men of few words, yet of deep feeling. I’m not so sure that the sheriff in High Noon was ultimately that interested in forgiveness, truthfully. So I’m glad his counterpart in my life turned out to be more amenable to the notion.

The soldier has worked hard to understand himself, to give himself over to what cannot be changed, to begin to change what can. He’d have always been the type to live the Serenity Prayer more than say it, truth be told, though I’m sure he’d not be against it. Wise men, young ones included, are willing to give even the standardized a shot.

He’s still frustrated, no doubt of that, sad as well. But together we discovered that words can make at least the beginning of a difference when said sincerely by two persons trying to make Life better. The old analysts always said that there is no such thing as a “mistake.” It’s never random when we disappoint one another. I’m afraid they’re probably right.

Thank goodness that in spite of that, my Sergeant Cooper was willing to give voice to at a least a few more words than “yup,” “nope,” and “can’t rightly say.”

While my two-month delay has had a lot to do with the demands of my new job, I have to be honest: the real reason says far more about the challenges of farewells than it does about the challenges of paperwork.

About three weeks before Memorial Day, I made the decision to cross the therapist’s Rubicon, to go, like Caesar, where I had been told I was not to go, fully aware that my crossing, like his, would be an irrevocable one, an act, even, of rebellion.

I comfort myself now by revealing that my Julian meeting was at least not going to be a secret one: I had discussed it with my wife beforehand, given that I could not guarantee her that I would be home any time before 10:00 AM on that Monday before my second daughter’s high school graduation open house.

My wife had been fine with my going, nonetheless, especially given that my young adult children would most likely not even have been humanoid by that hour anyway, so she had figured that she most likely would still be nursing her Keurig-brewed Starbucks at said hour, channel-surfing in a desperate attempt to find something worth watching on TV after her having bid the day’s farewell to Charlie Rose on CBS This Morning.

Now true, I had told no one at the VA about the proposed meeting, but so it goes . . .

“You going to be free on Memorial Day—early, I mean, like 7:30 or so?” I asked the young veteran on that fateful, “the die is cast” day, both of us seated quite comfortably in my office.

It was an honest question, after all. I knew that he too had had a big event planned for the same day as my daughter’s, so I hadn’t been sure that the woman in his life would be as flexible as she in mine had been.

Brides can be funny about wedding days, after all.

“Why do you ask?” he replied, in a manner both comfortable, yet somewhat guarded, that hallmark of so many of our interactions.

“Well, you know,” I stammered, “in a matter of a few weeks, I won’t be your doctor any more, and you won’t be my patient, or at least officially you won’t be my patient—although some people do say ‘once a patient, always a patient,’ and I guess they have a point, if you think about it, but then—“

“Doc,” he said, his smile a familiar one, his roll of the eyes one that had once been a recurring response to a well-loved battle buddy of his, one still so missed by us both. “Just spit it out, why don’t you?”

I had to smile myself. Step in water. Cross. Step out of water. March.

“I was thinking,” I went on. “Last year on Memorial Day, I went to Crown Point Cemetery and placed a flag at the grave of a patient’s father, and . . . well, this year I was thinking of doing that at Porthos’ grave, you know?”

The young veteran’s smile slowly melted, first into the quizzical and then, dare I say, into the hesitant. Yet he didn’t say a word.

“So I was wondering,” I faltered on, “whether you would have the time or whether you would like to meet me there, at the cemetery, you know. We could . . . get a bit to eat afterwards, maybe. You know? If you’d like, of course. Only . . . if you’d like.”

Thirty years I’ve been a psychiatrist, with well over twenty more years behind me practicing the art of basic communication in the English tongue. One would think I could have come up with something better than that, but there you have it.

“Of course, Doc,” he whispered, smile back in full force. “I’d love to.”

Apparently my children were not the only ones planning on sleeping in that Monday. I suppose every bride needs her beauty rest.

I bought the flag at the Canteen at the VA about a week before the Holiday, one of those tchotchkes that you always see people waving along the side of the road whenever the President is passing by in his motorcade from the airport to a convention center stage that looks the same in Seattle as it does in Poughkeepsie. I left said flag in the back seat of my Volkswagen, truthfully just so that I wouldn’t forget it and leave it at the hospital, yet also gambling that the sun would be merciful on it for the week’s wait, especially given that the chemical fibers of the flag’s “cloth” (ha-ha) would probably be strong enough to melt the sun itself before the latter would have the audacity to attempt to melt the former.

Monday morning, Memorial Day celebrated, finally came, and at the crack of dawn (i.e., 6:30 AM, same thing at my house on a three-day weekend) I headed south of Indianapolis, not even sure if the gates of my municipal cemetery destination would be unlocked at that time.

At 7:15, aided by the absence on the road of all drivers who had been smart enough to stay in bed that morning, I arrived to find the gates wide open.

It had been almost a good two months since I’d been there that first time. Yet without hesitation I recognized the winding road, visualized the tree by the veterans’ memorial, recalled the casket suspended over its final destination. Within minutes, destination found, I eased the car to a stop, turned off the engine, and just sat there, looking.

As if on cue, my cell phone rang.

“Sorry, Doc,” whispered the voice at the other end, in a tone familiar to anyone who has experienced that profoundest of parental joys, i.e., the waking up of teenagers on the first school day after Christmas vacation. “I overslept.”

No surprise, of course. By his report he’d never been the morning-type, even long before War had made sure that the dawning of a new day would never again spot him a feel-good freebie.

“No problem,” I replied. I remembered a mom-and-pop joint I’d passed by on the way into town. “Is it any good?” I asked. “We could eat before we head over.”

I swear I heard the smile over the phone. “Porthos and I ate there all the time,” he answered.

“See you when you get there,” was all I replied.

OK, so now: think Indiana. Now think of every diner that you’ve ever seen on TV where the show’s protagonists meet for coffee in the morning and where the waitress then walks up and reminds them that it’s Wednesday, so there’s still some peach cobbler left over from the day before, if they want some.

You’re there.

He arrived only about five minutes after I had, barely enough time for my downing two swigs of a coffee that, though not exactly flavorful, was not pitiful either, thank God. As he sat down, his whole demeanor, his whole “him” hit me again, full force. I could only imagine him in my mind’s eye, in some back-street club in Nashville, maybe, clad in a plain T-shirt and a pair of jeans, sitting by himself on a stool on the front stage, a couple of lights highlighting his each side, looking down at his guitar, strumming, quietly singing his soul as the patrons look on, their Miller Lites from the tap half-drunk, joining him in musical reveries of what had been, what might have been, what might still be hoped for.

“You gotta try the fried biscuits,” he said in an excited voice that I just as easily could also have imagined his having used with me had such a dream suddenly turned into a reality, after his having taken a break after the first set, probably, followed then by something akin to “Pretty good crowd tonight, Doc, you think?”

“The ones with the apple butter?” the real me asked. Yes, I’d seen them on the menu, I admit it.

“Porthos loved ’em. He’d practically swallow them whole.”

So of course I got them. Athos settled on biscuits and sausage gravy. What else for a Southern boy, right?

Porthos had known whereof he’d swallowed, it turned out. Lord, that place was so quintessential, I suspect they have one of the original patents on the whole breakfast menu.

We talked, not exactly buddy-talk, but certainly not doctor-patient “dialogue,” either. He was so excited to be getting married, so dyed-in-the-wool jittery. I talked some of my upcoming move, as I recall, as well as something of my daughter’s graduation, I’m sure, or of my son’s looking forward to his new school in Nashville, my wife’s looking forward to our downsizing, perhaps. Honestly I can’t quite remember. We needed only one java refill apiece, though, not that there hadn’t been time for more. I suspect neither of us had at that moment the stomach for more, literally and, yes, figuratively.

“Want to head over?” I finally asked.

For a few seconds he just looked at me, his face not exactly frozen, yet not exactly responsive either. He then looked down at his empty coffee cup, the only distraction available before him, the plate of gobbled-up biscuits long having been cleared away with a rapidity worthy of any waitress named Flo this side of the Mississippi.

“No,” he whispered, only then to bring his eyes back to mine. “But yes.”

As always, an honest man.

When we arrived at the graveside, we were still the lone living among the dearly departed, given the hour, most likely, but perhaps for other reasons as well, who knows. I got out first, shut my door, looked back at him in the car behind me. He was sitting behind the wheel, staring toward the grave. A few seconds later, jolted apparently by some slap across the face of his soul, given the sudden, quasi-violent shake of his head, he looked up at me, smiled (or at least tried to), and got out himself.

The headstone had not yet been placed at the grave, but the latter had certainly not been unattended: some flowers, a small wreath, tributes not having been lavished on any other soldiers’ remains in the entire area.

“His folks?” I asked Athos as soon as we’d reached the spot.

“I suspect so,” he answered.

“You come here any?” I continued, rolling the balsa wood flagpole in my fingers back and forth, back and forth.

He was gazing down toward the flowers and the settling earth before them. He’s a couple inches taller than I am, far more angular in appearance. Given that I was having literally to look up to him, his face somewhat silhouetted by the rising sun, for a moment he struck me as a young Lincoln, believe it or not, far more handsome, most definitely, yet just as burdened, just as sad.

“Every once in a while,” he finally said.

I turned my own gaze downward with him. After a few more moments of silence, I knelt down and inserted the flag into the ground, right next to the flowers. Down on my haunches, I was, for a few seconds at least, aware only of the man whose remains were below me, the man who only months earlier had so proudly assured me that he would get his prescription from the VA pharmacy on that day that he’d left his ID at home (an absolute no-no, of course), the man who’d then sashayed his way back into my office a half-hour later, dangling a sack of medications from his raised right hand, practically purring to me that “she thought I was cute, Doc, I told you. They taught us how to do that in Special Forces training, told you, told you.”

God, I miss him.

As I stood up, I heard a chuckle behind me. I turned to find Athos still staring downward, but smiling to beat the band.

“He’d have been so tickled that you did this, Doc,” he whispered, pausing only a few seconds before looking up at me, the tear trickling down his cheek, I suspect mine mirroring his.

The smile could only last so long.

“I miss him so much,” was all he could then say, clearly lest the single tear be joined by compatriots far too many, far too insistent.

It was only as we embraced right then, however, that our truth, his and mine, was spoken.

“I’m going to miss you so much, too,” he whispered into my ear, for a few moments hugging me even harder, only then to release me, to push himself back, to look down at the ground, to swallow, to look back up at me and then, without pause, to look back down again, his hands inserted into his pockets, his feet shifting, side, to side, to side.

“You know we’re going to stay in touch, don’t you, right?” I said after my own pause. I then moved a few steps toward him, took his face, and pulled it up slightly, bringing us one more time to that spot so familiar, so comfortable, so distressing to us both: eye to eye. “I won’t be able to do anything about the VA or anything like that, no medications, the whole bit. But . . . we’ll still talk. Just like always. Promise.”

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the gaze he gave back to me at that moment, the gaze of a man half my age, yet one who had lain by the coffin of Aramis in the belly of an airplane for hours on end, one who had taken Porthos’ folded flag from the hands of the highest-ranking officer of Indiana’s National Guard, only to pass it on to his buddy’s uncle with a solemn salute, the one who had buried his father, his sister. The last one standing.

He was reminding me that he could not afford to forget what I was trying so hard not to acknowledge: that separations matter, that Skype and FaceTime can only save us so much, that “still, just like always” is never either.

“Roger that, Doc” he whispered.

The good soldier, protecting his “superior” to the end.

I’m happy to report that he and I have indeed stayed in touch since my move. But, yes, it’s not just like always.

My last day at the Indianapolis VA was Friday, June 28, 2013. At 0400h (yes, that’s right) on July 1, 2013, my wife and I took my younger two children to the Indianapolis Airport to board a plane to Phoenix, Arizona, where they attended the national convention for the Mennonite Church USA. Only about an hour later, I drove my ridiculously-packed-up, blue Volkswagen away from my father’s house, where we’d been camping out since the sale of our home, after twenty-two years heading out of town one last time, now toward Nashville, Tennessee, toward a very different hospital than the VA, a very different life.

Yet I-65 South toward Louisville, with Nashville beyond, leads past a spot not too far away from a cemetery I’d visited just a month before. I thought of taking a brief detour. Yet I had a meeting to make in about four hours and then, after that, it was to be off to another meeting at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, forty-five minutes northwest of Nashville. No rest for the wicked. Or the weary.

So I drove on by. And remembered.

______________________________

It has been ten days since I penned those last words. I’m still as clueless as to how to wrap up this essay as I was then.

We all so wish we could tidy up our lives’ endings, slap on some aphoristic wisdom and then mosey on down the road to another venue, another opening of another show.

Yet how do I do that, how do I tidily say “goodbye” to young men and women who have known so up-close-and-personally, often time after time after time, those most untidy of Life’s endings? How dare I even think that a nice thought at seventy miles per hour, followed by a sentence fragment penned three months later, could be enough to say to a Musketeer and his battle buddies, both literal and figurative, adieu, let alone claim to say à Dieu, Godspeed.

As I sit in the quiet of my brand-new, far-smaller condo, I almost literally experience faces pass before me, faces of those who have cried who have raged, who have laughed. Unlike the faces of the dead, these do not haunt me, thankfully. They do remind me, though, how much Life matters, how quickly it can change, for good or no, how long it lingers even after it has allegedly moved on.

It’s been a long month of starting new jobs, new high schools, new colleges, new furniture settings, along with Lord-alone-knows-what-new-else’s. My wife has sworn on all that is Holy that she will never again gaze upon, let alone touch a Banker’s Box. I have to concur. We’re just hoping against hope that 1-800-GOT-JUNK has a franchisee somewhere within fifty miles of us.

But the blog kept calling, thankfully. Even more, so did the memories of the men and women whom I’ve had the honor to serve.

We weren’t supposed to have met, for example, he and I.

As I was finishing my last couple weeks at the VA in Indianapolis, I had made a pact, I guess you could call it, with the nursing staff not to take on any new patients. It had seemed only fair, after all, given my then lame-duck status. All in all, I kept up my end of the bargain.

Except for this one time.

I’ll blame one of my other colleagues (and why not? I’m gone, you know). He was the one to knock on my door at about 1400h one day to tell me, “Doc, you’ve got to see this guy. I know you’re leaving, but it’s bad.”

When I walked out my door, I saw in the waiting room a young man sitting about twenty feet from me, his hands gripping the sides of his chair for dear life, staring off to his right, my left, God-knows-where, having clearly been doing so for God-knows-how-long, given the tone of his forearm musculature. His shaved head accentuated his angular features, his gymnast’s posture and physique. He was wearing the nondescript dark shirt and dark basketball shorts that so often these days are the “just rolled out of bed” uniform of choice for men his age.

That would, of course, have assumed that he’d slept at all the night before.

“Sure, I’ll see him,” I said.

It’s been a good couple months now since he and I met, so many details have faded in my aging brain. His life had been falling apart, though, pain pills, the usual. His wife had had it. His family had had it. He’d managed, however, to get hold of some Suboxone (the opioid substitution medication) on the street, and he knew that if he could just take it regularly, he wouldn’t wake up every day obsessed with finding the next pill, given that the “next high” had long before been a luxury that had, through the miracle of the body’s ability to adjust to the effects of opiates, faded into distant memory.

He had, in other words, become part of that elite group that uses opiates not for fun, but for survival.

He was doing all he could not to be irritable with me. I assured him I wasn’t offended by his periodic failures in that endeavor. Clearly he was dope sick. At times I could practically map the waves of nausea as they progressed from his gut, cell by excruciating cell, throughout his body.

What I can never forget, though, is one line of his story.

“They called me the ‘IED magnet,’” he told me. “Thing was: I was always the one who lived.”

Many others—and I mean many others—had not been so fortunate.

Neither can I forget his intensity as he told me his tale, an intensity only somewhat heightened by the strength of his withdrawal symptoms. He had the gaze that I’ve come to see so often in many young combat veterans: one both hollow and piercing, as if the ocular orbit out of which these veterans peer seems suddenly to project a rocket-propelled grenade of psyche straight toward my own eyes, no warning, no mercy.

But when I started to talk to him about combat trauma, he could only say, “Please. I’m sick. Can we just talk about that later?”

He agreed to come back a couple days later, although because he was having such difficulties getting along with his family, he was not sure he could find a ride.

But he did.

He returned in garb just as collegiate, but now more appropriate for a grueling one-on-one at the basketball court, rather than for a semi-stupor on the pull-out couch in the living room, sheets not included. His gaze had followed the lead of his garments: more lively, more suave, even.

“This stuff is amazing,” he said to me. “I feel like a human again.”

And, indeed, he was acting like one.

That was not, however, comforting me, I’m afraid.

For again, although the details fail me all these weeks later, the image does not: his sitting there in the chair in my office, one ankle calmly pivoting over the other knee, opining at length about whatever, his child, his failing marriage, the war.

Note: I didn’t just write The War. Just . . . the war.

Similarly, I also cannot forget my own experience at that moment, my sitting there, watching him, listening to him, wondering over and over and over, with his each calm explanation, his each pensive musing: “Wait a minute . . . was I . . . was he . . . am I missing something? Did I overreact the other day? What the . . .?”

Finally, I had to speak it.

“I’m sorry, but . . . I can’t help but notice that you seem to be talking about The War almost as if we were sitting over cocktails in smoking jackets, chatting in British accents about some ‘dreadful little incident, you know, old chap?’ I mean . . . if I hadn’t met you a couple days ago, right here, in this room, if I hadn’t sat in this very chair and felt you say those words—‘IED magnet’—why . . . well, I’d think, ‘This guy’s doing just fine.’ But . . . I know better.”

For a moment, he said nothing. I said nothing. His eyes, however—and I suspect mine as well—picked up all the conversational slack, for how long, I can’t tell you.

“And so do you,” I finally said right to him, intending it just as tersely as I’d said it.

Our eyes continued to speak to each other, although saying what, I couldn’t have told you.

“Am I right?” I eventually asked. “Or am I overblowing all this?”

Ever so slowly his ankle slid off the opposite knee, his leg just as slowly planting its foot back onto terra firma. Not a cell of the remainder of his body moved. Including his eyes.

“Yes,” he finally whispered. “You’re right.”

Another silence.

“You know,” I said (more like stammered), “when you’re like this, you really hide it, the pain that both you and I know is there. I mean, you’re good, really good at that. No one would ever suspect—unless they knew already, of course. But even then . . .”

He assayed a smile, though all other cells, again eyes included, remained motionless.

“I know,” he said. “But I don’t know how else to do it, to say it, whatever ‘it’ is, you know? I . . . I can see that people want to know that it’s all right, that I’m all right, that the past is the past, that it’s done. So . . . I give them what they want.”

“And then they blame you for being a loser drug addict, right?” I replied. “Since they’re assuming you’ve put all that War stuff behind you?”

Slowly the cells began to shift within him, easing him into a sadness that was only slightly perceptible, yet, for any who would dare look for it, readily discernible.

“You do what you have to do,” he finally said. “You protect them, even when they don’t know it. Goes along with the territory.”

The semi-smile returned as he inched forward in his chair and then slowly stood up.

“You gave me something to think about today, Doc” he said as he offered me his hand. As soon as I’d shaken it, he turned to walk out the door, only to stop, turn back, grab me one more time with those eyes, and simply say, “Not bad, Doctor. Not bad at all.”

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought about that man in the intervening weeks, how many times I’ve realized that I’ve met him many times before, in that veteran that one time, in that soldier now. So many civilians have no clue whatsoever how sharp, how perceptive many of these men and women are. So many assume that people go into today’s military to escape rotten childhoods, to find something to do with their lives that are going nowhere, to get three meals and a cot that they’d otherwise not be able to put together enough intelligence and common sense to provide for themselves in any reliable fashion.

How wrong, how utterly wrong they often are.

How often I also hear the “twenty per cent” number thrown around, the “official” estimate of the number of returning OEF/OIF veterans who are suffering from combat trauma/PTSD. Occasionally you’ll see a “thirty” pop up here and there, but just as often you’ll read of very smart people marveling that the “rate” isn’t higher than it is, thank Goodness.

Perhaps they’re right. I’m just a country psychiatrist trying to make a living, after all, as one of my former supervisors used to drawl.

I guess if one never asks to take a sip out of the drinks that others are pouring down their throats, though, one never has to know whether those burns making their way down those esophagi are stings of delight or, shall we say, stings of a much, much different toxicity.

I received the text earlier this week, at 1404h, Central Daylight Time, Tuesday, July 2, 2013, a picture.

He looked great, wearing what appeared to be a simple, black suit/tux, sporting with it a white, pointed-collar shirt, well-starched, and a formal black tie, half-Windsor knotted. I suspect the picture had originally been taken at his older brother’s wedding not long ago. He had that certain “brother of the groom” air about him, after all: slightly annoyed to be all decked out on a day that wasn’t exactly his, yet pleased well enough all the same, knowing full well, of course, that he looked mighty fine in these trappings, if he did say so himself.

In the background was an American flag and the unmistakable emblem of the United States Marine Corps. He would, undoubtedly, have been far more proud of those than he would have of his handsome mugshot.

I have finally made the move to Nashville. I have finally found the time to sit quietly with my cup of Tazo Zen tea. I have finally found the courage to announce, again with the permission of his family, that on Friday, July 5, 2013, another fine young man whom I had the honor to serve was laid to rest.

He died early in the morning hours of my final day of service at the VA in Indianapolis. I learned of his passing late that afternoon. As had been Ethan’s death (Reporting for Duty, Sir), his had not appeared to have been self-inflicted, and it had come without warning. He had spoken to family and to his best friend mere hours before, in good spirits, looking forward to his and my final meeting together before my move, even more looking forward to plans for treatment and for a new chance at a life perhaps less pain-filled, definitely more hope-filled.

He was buried in a community far both from my former home and my new one. I had a couple chances to speak with his mother. I asked her to convey my sincerest condolences to his father, his brother, his grandfather, and all those whom he had loved and who had loved him.

I did not, therefore, hear “Taps” a third time in as many months. Yet as I sit here, watching the Cumberland River quietly drift by me, ferrying branches big and small toward destinations perhaps just around the bend, perhaps miles away, with the occasional speed boat barreling by, ferrying revelers trying to swig down one last Miller Lite before heading back to post-Fourth of July reality, I can so easily imagine a bugler standing on the shore opposite me, looking me directly in the eye, nodding, lifting his instrument to his lips to announce not only to me but to anyone else within earshot that another who tried the best he could to do the best he could has departed us, only then, after the fading of the last note, lowering that instrument, tucking it under his left arm, raising his right hand in that four-count salute rendered only to those who deserve it, holding it, lowering his arm in another four counts, then looking up at me, nodding, and finally with a sharp about-face, turning to walk away from the bank, into the trees, into the memory and the imagination from which he had come.

My patient—let’s call him “Kurt”—came from a successful family of international entrepreneurs, his father’s lineage Dutch, his mother’s, Hispanic. He’d attended the finest of schools as a boy, a teenager. Easily he could have attended the finest of universities after that. He was smart, multilingual, bearishly handsome, affable, after all: Cambridge, New Haven, New York, Princeton, all would have gladly welcomed him, no questions asked.

But this boy had an energy that only the Marines could handle.

He was so proud of his unit. He had given me a copy of its insignia, all ready to be mounted on my rear window should I have so desired (and with his full permission, I might add, implying that such would have been enough to get me through any subsequent interrogations by fellow Marines as to why I might have been claiming the right to be lollying around town with such an honored accouterment). He was a Marine’s Marine.

Thus, he never forgave himself for the training incident the week prior to his deployment, the one during which his right arm was so shattered, he finally had to lose one bone altogether in order to preserve whatever function allowed to him, the one after which he was separated permanently from the other two men on his team whom he’d come to love more than Life itself . . .

From the other two men who—along with Kurt’s replacement, less prepared than Kurt had been—died only weeks later in an IED explosion that Kurt, to his final moments, I’m certain, believed with his every living cell that he could have avoided had he been there or, at the very least, he could have endured with his friends together, one final time.

From that point on, Kurt’s life was embedded within pain. He had to take pain medications at levels that still cause me to tremble at the very thought. He endured constant nightmares of a vicious home invasion he had survived as a youth—with night after night after night of such nightmares ending with his escaping (which, in real life, he had), while his Marine buddies, captured in the dream, were slaughtered by the intruders, over and over and over again.

Yet, there was not always pain between us.

The day had not started out well, almost two years ago, now. His pain had been so acute, he was considering suicide. He refused to stay in the hospital. I refused to let him leave. It was tense, to say the least. Finally I had to call the VA Police to stand watch outside my office as I arranged the admission in the secretary’s office next door.

Then I heard it.

“Hey, Doc!” came the policeman’s voice, not exactly panicked, but not exactly calm either.

Good God, I could only think.

“What?”

“Uh, sir . . . I’m not quite sure how to tell you this, but your patient just jumped out your office window.”

I kid you not.

Now, fortunately, it was a first-floor office. Yet it was still a good six-foot drop.

I had barely turned around before seeing said policeman zoom around the corner, heading toward the front door of the building, the words he’d been shouting into his walkie-talkie lingering behind him like an ether cloud, as sound apparently could not travel as fast as that man was moving. I’ll never forget walking up to my office, by this point all alone (since all others within fifty feet had made similar dashes around said corner), only to see my office window wide open.

I’d not even had a clue that the window could have been opened.

But that’s not the best part.

Within five minutes, Kurt marched right back in, now accompanied by three policemen and a host of other witnesses, with that same nonchalant look that, come to think of it, he’d shown in that picture from his brother’s wedding.

“What happened?” I asked (a stupid question, I know, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say).

“I needed a cigarette,” he told me, as calmly as all get-out. “The cop said I couldn’t go out to get one, and I knew I couldn’t smoke upstairs in the hospital, so I just decided I’d find me a way to get one more cigarette while I still could.”

I do so wish there had a been a picture of my face at the moment, given that my memory of his face was that he was still struggling to figure out what all the big deal was about.

“Are you kidding me?” was all I could say, standing there, as I was, in front of a good half the Hospital’s police force, along with God and all Nature, to boot.

“He’s not,” the original policeman chimed in. “Really. By the time we got out there, he was just standing there, putting his lighter back in his pocket, taking a few puffs, asking us why we were all so upset.”

Kurt just smiled. “I told ‘em I just wanted to smoke a cigarette. I guess they didn’t believe me.”

I repeat: kid you not.

I swear to God, also: by the next day I had so many environmental engineers swarming into that office, I’d have died hermetically-sealed in said room should any disaster have struck thereafter, nuclear or otherwise. I wonder if, now that I”m gone, Homeland Security is using it as a holding cell for those too dangerous for Gitmo.

One of my other patients, a former Marine officer, had heard the “Legend of the Jumping Marine” somewhere along the way (who hadn’t?), and I’ll never forget the smile as wide as the nearby White River when he spoke to me about said affaire mémorable.

“Now that’s a Marine, I tell you. You tell them to go take that hill, and they ask you ‘How many times, Sir?’ You gotta love ‘em.”

Indeed, you do.

So I sit here, now sipping San Pellegrino, and I ask myself, “What can I say?” How can I honor him in the same way that phantom bugler did only a short time ago, disturbing the peacefulness of the river in my mind’s eye not so as to upset, but rather so as to remind, to call me to remember what it means for some men and women to choose to accept a life that they were not forced to accept, to choose to face risks that many of us would have preferred that they not have faced, whether for reasons of love or for those of ideology

I can only do so at this moment, I believe, by honoring his pain, honoring it so that others may know the depth of his suffering, honoring it so that others, perhaps, can begin to know something of the sufferings of many, many of his brothers and sisters who have served in combat, who entered War and left War with a capacity for emotional power that few had allowed themselves to realize before, let alone even to accept now.

With each passing day, with each troop or veteran I meet, I become more convinced that many, many civilians simply cannot begin to fathom the physicality of the warrior’s emotions, whether that warrior be a man or a woman. Granted, there are some civilians (more than a few, I might add) who are “warriors in spirit,” who can indeed find themselves caught up, sometimes quite frequently, in similar depths. Yet most civilians, I assert with solid confidence, must learn the following formula and apply it, whether they think they should have to or not:

Take whatever emotion you have ever felt in your life—joy, curiosity, grief, rage, anxiety, sensuality, shame, whatever—localize it in your body, and then imagine it now crashing down into your gut with a force that draws your every inner organ into it like some whirlpool out of Hell. Then repeat, shoving all of it down into that whirlpool even more deeply. Then repeat. Eight more times.

By the time you hit Whirlpool Ten, you’ll be close to the emotional experience of the Warrior. Not there. But close.

I have yet to meet a troop or a veteran who has not known, full well with bells on his/her toes, that he or she was going to have to “Move On” from his/her wounds of the extremities, of the brain, of the soul. That’s never the issue, no matter how many times, no matter who adds the adverb just to that phrase, as if somehow the person uttering such nonsense were finally giving said troop or veteran the psychological equivalent of a reminder that s/he could have also had a V-8.

It’s never about “moving on.” It’s about what one has to drag along, from the very depths of one’s soul, whenever one does move on.

Everyone has experienced gut-wrenching emotions. Not everyone has had to experience such emotions every single time that door marked “Emotions” is opened, even when one is desperately, desperately hoping that the last five loads of psychic lumber with which you’d tried to nail that door shut will hold, please, dear God, please.

I sometimes read “pain experts” pontificate about the “psychological overlay” of pain as if they were finally giving us the news that we’d never considered and that will now finally open all of us to the Promised Land of the cognitive. I know about all the evidence. I know about all the good intentions of all who have so published in the journals, opined in the op-ed pieces, spoken to the cameras in the well-orchestrated segments of the latest news show, the latest radio spot.

Yet Kurt’s grief over his fallen buddies, his shame over his injuries, his anxiety over his future: they so Hurt with a capital H, so overran his biological pain receptors with the same ferocity, the same violence with which those intruders had once overran his boyhood home, he had to sweat with psychic blood every ounce of hope that he was able to earn. Hope, for him, was a hill that made Iwo Jima look like Kiddieland.

But he always asked me the same thing, every time, every time: “How many times do you want me to take it, Sir?”

How many times.

Until the day you have been able to imagine your whole body being wracked with an emotion so powerful that it brings you to your knees, always figuratively, often literally, with each sunrise; until the day you have been able to imagine the courage it takes to rise up, under such circumstances, and walk ten miles or, maybe, just take the dog out; until the day you can feel your most powerful emotion in your most painful of spots and can then say to yourself, “Oh, my God: do you mean it can feel worse than this?” and know that there are men and women out there in their teens, in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and beyond who can answer a resounding “Yes!” while trying not to relive, yet never to forget horrors and truths that, hopefully, you’ll never even have to imagine imagining—until then, please, please, please: never speak to a troop or a combat veteran the equivalent of the English words, “Move on.”

My title, of course, is a polyglot admixture, the Dutch goed with the Spanish hombre, the admixture of “A Good Man,” the admixture that was Kurt, the admixture that could have taken a much easier road, but whohad refused to do so, the admixture who so many times had wanted to give up on that hill called Hope, so far from Bill Clinton’s Arkansas hometown of the same name, the admixture who had many, many times stumbled and fallen as he’d tried to take that hill, the admixture who had nevertheless kept trying, kept trying, semper fidelis to the end.

As with Porthos, as with Ethan, I have not earned the right to salute you, Kurt, my friend, as that bugler did in my mind mere minutes ago. So I can only give you what I gave them, unfortunately only in the Spanish of your lengua maternal and not also in the Dutch of your paternal tongue.

But do know that if I could have spoken both languages, I would have. As always, Kurt. As always.

Even though I had promised to break my blog “fast” with reflections on the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath, Life led me elsewhere. Thankfully.

I have known him for a while now, this former Special Operations soldier. He had seen—and more, had experienced—more than his share of horrors in the Middle East, often accompanied only by a few men who eventually came to mean Life itself to him. “Brothers” finally took on a meaning that previously he’d only dreamed of.

There were those who didn’t make it back.

He struggled in the years afterwards, making some attempts at treatment, but finding none that he found that useful. Drugs, especially painkillers, became his constant companion. He knew he was wasting his life. Finally he faced a severe medical crisis. He came home to Indianapolis to seek the medical treatment he needed—and even more, to find a reason to keep on living.

The medical treatment, he received. The painkiller problem remained, however. And thus we met.

At first he was probably more eager for Suboxone (the opiate substitution medication) than I was. His medical treatment had taken a lot out of him, after all, and he had very real reasons to have very real pain. While Suboxone is sometimes useful as an analgesic, it has not been, in my experience, the best painkiller that has found its way onto the planet. I urged him to hold off, to have us work together first to keep his pain medications steady, on a schedule, controlled, until he could recover further.

During those initial weeks he laid out his story of War. Even when hurting, even when on pain medications, he was quick-minded, analytical to the max, a strategist par excellence, just as he had been in the military. Yet at the same time, in a way unusual for men as gung-ho as he, he was unafraid to acknowledge his more disturbing emotions, his fears of never getting better, his grief over buddies never to be seen again.

“I’ve played around with this too long, Doc,” he eventually told me. “I’ve just got to get my head together, my life. I can’t keep going like this.”

Indeed he couldn’t. I suspect he’d always been on the wiry side, but both his medical treatment and his drug usage had left him a bit less imposing that he certainly once had been. His curly hair was of a length far afield from the judicious cuts of his military days, no doubt: neat, clean, true, yet in a certain way more an afterthought, as if the rest of his body was having to work long past quitting time to keep the legions of locks on his head from tipping him over sideways.

Eventually he started the Suboxone. It was indeed helpful.

But nowhere near as helpful as the woman he met one fine day.

I walked out of my office one afternoon to find a man sitting in the waiting area whom I’d never met, his long, jeans-covered legs comfortably stretched out a good mile and a half into the center of the room as he sat askew in his chair, perusing some cheap magazine from off the table next to him, his hair cropped stylishly short, his entire musculature at parade-rest, I guess one could say, both at ease and yet, what, ready, just in case. The man looked up at me, smiled, and shot a quick wave.

It was he.

“Sorry,” I said once we’d made our way to my office. “I didn’t recognize . . . well, the hair!”

He grinned. “Oh, yeah: got tired of it hanging all over the place, I guess.”

“You better believe ‘I guess,’” I replied, impressed by how the cut made him look both older and younger simultaneously, more seasoned, yet more daring.

“I think my girlfriend likes it better like this,” he said as he folded his hands onto his lap, sliding himself down into a just-hanging-out-here slump that was anything but sloppy.

“So all’s going well with you guys?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, real well,” he answered, as if that were so old-hat news he’d not even considered I might ask such a dumb question. “Her kids are great. I . . .”

Then he stopped, for moment staring right at me, but at the same time right through me, not in that way that gives one chills, but rather in a way that seemed to advise me that even if he were to speak further, our conversation would not be resuming any time soon.

“You know,” he finally whispered, “I . . . I was really afraid that I’d never find love, that I was too screwed up. I couldn’t ever get women to listen to me. But that’s what she does: listens. She doesn’t freak out. She just . . . listens. I feel so safe with her, steady, like I haven’t felt in I-don’t-know-how-long.”

After a few seconds, he returned his gaze back from wherever to me. If a smile can be calm, his was.

“What a good thing, eh?” I could only respond.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Yes, it is.”

Sadly, in the world of modern combat veterans, calm smiles often last only so long.

It was a few weeks later that I received word that he was wanting to speak to me right away. Fortunately I was able to see him later that day.

The news was not good. His battle buddy, the man “closer than a brother “ to him, had just committed suicide.

“I . . . I had no idea,” he whispered to me, doing everything a good military man can do to maintain the composure that was anything but his. The two of them had been in continuous contact. They had spoken only a few hours earlier. There had been problems in the man’s life, true, but . . .

He went to the funeral, of course, faithfully watching over his buddy’s widow in the very way he knew the man would have done had the roles been reversed, had it been the ever-patient, ever-listening woman at his side who would have received the folded flag.

“I did OK, Doc,” he later told me. “Except when they played ‘Taps.’ I lost it. I just . . . lost it.”

The months passed by. He found a job. He had to in-out a few appointments, assuring me that he was doing OK, not great, but OK. Then recently he came in, collapsed in the chair by my desk, and gave me that look that I’ve seen from so many veterans with whom I’ve had the honor to work: the “yeah, Doc, the jig’s up” look.

Time to be gentle. Time to be real.

“Not good?” I asked.

He shook his head, his at-me/through-me look back. “I can’t sleep,” he replied. “Nightmares, constant thoughts about what we had to do, what we saw. I miss him like anything, yet I could just kill him if he weren’t dead! Is that a terrible thing to say?”

I had to smile. “It’s true, though, isn’t it? You’d like to smack him up the side of the wall, and yet you’d like to hold on to him as if there were no tomorrow, all at the same time, right?”

His smile in return was pained, no longer calm. Yet it was still a smile.

“You better believe it.” After a few moments, “Will this ever end?”

Again, the question I hear day after day after day.

“Will a certain sadness, a certain pain never end?” I reply. “Probably not. Probably shouldn’t. But it’s like I tell all the guys: the pain doesn’t have to hurt like this. Even though you know this all happened in the past, your brain is still experiencing everything as if it were happening right here, right now. You’re reliving it all, not remembering it. Once you can get from relive to remember, it does feel different, easier in a way—not easy, but easier, in a meaningful way.”

We talked about his various treatment options at the Clinic, both individual and group. He was certainly interested, yet his work schedule did make regular attendance at therapeutic sessions complicated. Still, he told me, “It helps to know I can get better. Thanks.”

Then came last week.

He’s gained some of his bulk back. In no way is he small. He’s more agile: not wound tight, ready to spring, but more ready to dart, stealthily, sort of like the Road Runner with good upper-body strength.

The calm smile was back.

“You look good,” I told him.

“Thanks,” he replied, almost shyly. “You know, I . . . I got a couple new tattoos a few weeks ago, and it’s like . . . well, I don’t know quite how to put it. It’s like . . . I’m better.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I had added two more, on my back. One has some initials, dates: for the guys we lost. But it was the one for my battle buddy, it . . . it changed everything. You know, it was like you said: I need to remember, not relive. I’ve joined this group of vets who get together and just talk. The leader of the group’s been great, got me to thinking, ‘what more could I have done?’ And like it hit me: nothing. I could have done nothing more. I would have done anything for him. He was more my brother than my real brother is. But I did all I could. I loved him like no one else. That’s . . . that’s it. That’s it.”

He said it all right to me. Gone was the right-through-me. Even after all the one-to-one we’d experienced together so far, this was five levels deeper. At least.

“You know,” I finally said, “if I could ask: what was it about the tattoo? How did it make the difference?”

The calm smile turned quizzical, not in a threatening way, more in a “now, isn’t that a question” way. He looked off for a bit, a few seconds only, then looked right back at me.

“You know, when he died, the moment he killed himself, he ripped a part of me right away, yanked it out. There was this big, gaping wound in my heart, my soul. You can’t know, Doc, you just can’t know how much he meant to me. He was hurting so badly, so badly, and I couldn’t save him. I don’t know what made me do it, but I just one day decided I needed to carry him on my back, the rest of my life. You know, it’s funny: it’s almost as if I needed to hurt to get him back, to feel the pain of the tattoo, to do it for him. And it’s weird: all of a sudden, when the guy was done making it, it was as if my buddy was sewn right back into me, filling that hole, like he’s going to be at my back, day in, day out. I walked out of that parlor and, I don’t know, it was as if a huge burden just rolled off me. I . . .”

He smiled again, not so much calm this time as, what, thankful. Tearfully thankful. His water-rimmed eyes ever slowly reached out and took mine in their grasp, not forcefully, but confidently. Sadly, but confidently.

“It’s like you said, Doc,” he whispered. “I don’t have to relive. I can just remember.”

The old psychoanalysts always talked about the psychic, emotional power of the skin, that millimeter-thick barrier that keeps us both whole and vulnerable, that both contains us and exposes us.

Yet for one wiry, analytical man who has finally found love, finally found the family who can accompany him into the future, his skin has also freed him, has put a past in its place, has grafted onto him a different, yet equally-powerful love that will link a well-loved past into a well-loved future and finally, as much as can be done after War, make him whole.

Spring has slowly been intimating its way into Indiana these past several days, although, admittedly, I’m being kind in giving it this much due. Still, the snow is gone, and temperatures are edging toward their becoming worthy of some notice beyond “scorn.” Yet while the thermometer has only been cooperating begrudgingly, the barometer has been anything but: beautiful, nearly cloudless skies have been ours to enjoy.

Funny, isn’t it, how the living prefer sunshine for funerals.

As I have noted in previous posts (Goodbye, My Friend and In Memoriam: Porthos, 1985-2013), my patient, Porthos, a combat veteran of two deployments to Iraq, age twenty-seven, died in an auto accident a little over a week ago. He had grown up in a town that had once had the decency to be out in the boondocks, but which has, over the years, become another bedroom community for Indianapolis. It’s quite a hike, nevertheless, from my house, so I headed out in plenty of time, ostensibly so that I could secure an adequate parking spot.

In reality, I was just needing the time to myself.

All the way down there, I couldn’t stop thinking about a topic so near and dear to so many therapists’ hearts, minds, and critiques: boundaries. Truly, I’m not sure what some therapists would do if they weren’t policing not only their own, but everyone else’s, twenty-four seven, usually with, if I may so say, a certain self-satisfied, ethical purity.

Yet in spite of my snarkiness, the topic is indeed a critically important one, signifying as it does the question of how much should the personal and the professional be allowed to co-mingle in a therapeutic relationship. Certain answers to that question are easy, of course: no sexual favors, no financial manipulation, for example. Others plague all young therapists and many older ones: when, if ever, does one accept a nominal gift from a client/patient? How much does one reveal about one’s personal life, one’s experiences, one’s disappointments?

Or . . .

Does one embrace a patient’s grieving father, his grieving mother, his grieving brother—his grieving best friend who also has medicine bottles in his bathroom cabinet that have printed upon them my name?

As the traffic thinned out, as the several lanes merged into two, I had to wonder: for whom was I going down there? For Porthos? His family? My other patient, his battle buddy through both deployments, Athos?

For me?

After thirty years in this business, I have come to the conclusion that the answer to all such questions is E, i.e., “all of the above.” I can live with that. I have learned that these things have a way of working themselves out.

I pulled into the lot of the funeral home with more than enough time to spare before the service, dutifully then backing into my parking spot as I was instructed, my purple “Funeral” flaglet well-perched on the roof above me.

Men and women were already there, though, even more dutifully standing guard along the sidewalk leading to the entry door, all clearly my senior, most dressed in leather, many with the familiar POW-MIA emblem from the Vietnam era emblazoned on their backs, holding the United States flags that so readily were flapping in the cool breeze, their Harleys parked only feet away, ready to be mounted, to be driven at the head of a procession to the cemetery, in a silence that not even the loudest of mufflers could pierce.

About ten minutes later, Athos and his fiancée arrived in their SUV. After backing the car in almost directly across from me, he turned off the engine and, in moments, was looking directly at me. The smile of recognition was there on his face, yet he knew it as well as I did: neither of us wanted to be seeing each other at that moment. He zipped an open palm past his face, once, in that muted “Hi” so often seen in old home movies when a person has that ridiculous light glaring into his or her face, hoping against hope that Uncle Maury will just move on to the next relative and leave me the heck alone.

I got out of my car first, only then to watch him somewhat pour himself out of his, almost as if he were maple sap reluctantly exiting through that spigot in the trunk of the tree during a sub-zero winter. Yet door shut, he turned to me in his suit, dark shirt, dark tie, a little too slender, true (as countless maternal types had reminded him at the viewing the night before), yet still ready for his Jos. A Bank’s photo shoot. He smiled again at me, adjusted his tie as he did his obligatory “look both ways,” so well learned in first grade, and then began to walk across the driveway toward me.

He marched right up to me, eyes refusing to let anything even approaching a tear to leak out, trying to maintain some semblance of a smile. His beard was well-trimmed. His hair was neatly cut, longer than military, definitely, yet still a certain “short chic.” Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway was back, in other words, at your service. Preparing to bury Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby.

For a second or so, we just looked at each other.

“Thanks for coming, Doc,” he finally said, a certain hesitancy more than apparent.

This was it. I knew it. The boundary decision.

So I made it.

I opened my arms wide.

His eyes saw their chance, and for just a few seconds they forced his entire facial musculature to contract in response, both giving in to tears and refusing to do so, as he nearly fell into me, wrapping his arms around my upper body, his head in an instant buried at my neck, his body seeking my ballast to help steady those eyes and get those partners back in line, buddy-boy, and I mean, right now.

“I don’t know if I can get through this, Doc” he whispered, quickly, desperately, right into my ear.

“I know you don’t,” I whispered back into his. “You don’t have to think you will. You just will. You’ll do it, and you’ll have no clue how. For his family. For him.”

For a few seconds, nothing, then another whisper entered my ear. “Thank you, Doc.”

Just as quickly we separated and looked at each other. His smile was trying to weasel its way back into place.

“I’ve got to go in and see his folks. You’re coming to the cemetery, aren’t you?”

“Of course,” I replied.

He cleared his throat, adjusted his tie one more time, and then his sunglasses. “OK, great, I’ll . . . I guess I’ll see you inside?”

“Of course.”

The smile having reasserted itself, he was gone with the nod of a head.

Several minutes later I entered the funeral home myself, making my way to the large room where just the night before I’d walked in to see at the end a large wooden casket, carved and stained in such a way as to remind any onlooker of a life that had been honorably, even beautifully lived. A United States flag, well-folded into its triangular form, lay on top of one end of the casket, various pictures and a sports jersey on the other.

As I took my seat in the far back corner, by all the pictures that had been assembled and displayed along the back of the room, I looked down to see on the table next to me a five by seven of two very young-appearing men, stocky, I think, more because of all the outfit and combat gear each was sporting than because of any good, home-cooked meals out in the desert. Each had a “go ahead, cross me, I dare you” look chiseled on his face. I had both to smile and to bite my lip.

Porthos and Athos, bodies so proud, yet eyes already having begun to be transformed by War.

In Central Indiana, it usually seems as if all funeral homes are constantly jockeying for the title of “Most Gaudily Edwardian.” Fortunately, this one had bowed out of competition at a more respectable moment. I was quite glad, in fact, that as the music began to be piped in, it was not the usual, top-ten hits of nineteenth-century, Methodist hymns being played far too slowly and far too cheesily on a Hammond, draw-bar spinet.

Quite the contrary. It made me smile without any lip-biting.

It was Josh Groban.

All I could think: Porthos, a veteran of many a barroom scuffle brought on by some unsuspecting, churlish drunk who’d made the poor decision to “dis” or threaten one of Porthos’ buddies; Porthos, the guy who’d argue a point with you well into near-absurdity just to prove to you that you couldn’t run over him . . .

Porthos, the man who, after being awakened one more time by the terrors of nightmares that had left him drenched in sweat, would calm himself by watching Harry Potter movies, over and over again, so often that he could quote entire scenes by heart . . .

Of course, Josh Groban. Of course.

Soon the room was packed not just with the usual cadre of retired individuals who apparently plan their golf schedules around funeral services, but also—even mostly—with dozens of young men, still well-built as their hairlines were receding, and dozens of young women, still with sensuous smiles after having put on that extra pound or so after their last pregnancy. Some were dressed to the nines. Some were wearing T-shirts and jeans. All would embrace over and over, smiles radiating “It’s been too long,” yet voices soft enough not to remind any of them that one of their gang, though still in the room in body, was now quiet, quiet as he’d never been in high school, never in the Army, never in life.

At some point, Porthos’ mother saw me, came over, hugged me, and said “Thanks for coming.” My reply was as it had been to Athos: “Of course.” We looked briefly at each other, two parents of different children, yet both parents nonetheless. We both knew there was nothing more to say. We left it at that.

Eventually his older brother and his girlfriend made it toward the front of the room, then his younger brother and his husband. His younger brother, D’Artagnan, caught my eye. He smiled, waved sheepishly, as did I in return. Once more, we left it at that.

Finally, as Porthos’ mother took her place next to her youngest son, his heartbroken father walked in and took his place on her other side, the college professor dressed for a no-nonsense lecture, ready to see his son off with the honor the younger man deserved.

Athos and his fiancée were barely a few seats away from them.

As the service progressed, as the National Guard chaplain whom Porthos had so deeply admired spoke, as Indiana’s Adjutant General looked on, as both his father and his younger brother tearfully remembered him, admired him as their hero, as the quintet of friends apparently from high school sang in Appalachian open harmony, quite in tune, a song drenched in country-western fervor, yet universal in sentiment, I could only think: my God, what if I hadn’t come?

Boundaries, schmoundaries.

I have to wonder: if more of my VA colleagues across the nation were to attend just such services, feel the lives of the men and women we have served, absorb the sadness and the futility of lives cut off far too soon, whether in battle, in the accidents of those who had always imagined themselves indestructible, in the self-destructions of those who could no longer imagine a future without excruciating pain of body and soul—what then? Who would we be? To whom, to how many in this country could we then announce, scream, pontificate, plead to not forget, not abandon, not leave these same men and women worrying one more day about where their next meal will come from, about whether they will have a roof over their heads?

The service over, I was one of the first to be escorted up front. For a couple seconds, I stood before the casket, not even sure I was wanting to have the wherewithal to understand the import of the moment. Just as quickly I turned to meet the eyes of his younger brother, to embrace him and hear him say “Thank you,” to hear myself once again saying “Of course.” Then it was his mother, same.

Then it was his father.

For a moment we looked at each other, Dad to Dad. As we embraced, his voice broke ever so softly. “Thanks for helping him talk about what he needed to talk about.”

This time, my “Of course” served more as my defense against the breaking of my own voice.

I shook the hand of his older brother, and then I turned to see Athos sitting there, head down, quickly batting at his eye. He looked up at me, and then in an instant was standing, and one more time, boundaries were . . . well, I don’t know, they just were.

Another firm embrace. Another “Thank you” whispered into my ear. Another “Of course” whispered into his.

The cemetery was not that far from the funeral home, though it wasn’t a stone’s throw either. It was quite a line of cars making its way down the divided highway, led by the police car and a pack of very loud, very silent Harley-Davidsons. Interesting, I thought: out in this more rural area, cars were stopping as the procession went by, even when they were going the opposite direction on a divided highway. You’d never see that in Indianapolis.

We wound our way to the rear of the cemetery—to the burial ground of soldiers from all the way back to the Civil War. His was a beautiful spot, right next to an ancient tree. The family sat down in the tent. The rest of us gathered along the sides. Across from us were the two rows of marksmen (and women), standing at attention, ready. To the far right, a lone man stood, also at attention, a bugle tucked underneath his arm.

Men and women in uniform gathered to the left of us, all ages, each falling into a respectful parade-rest. Six men then came to full attention and, in well-orchestrated fashion, marched their way to the back of the hearse. With a series of precise, right-angle turns, one of them made his way to the door and opened it.

There he was, Porthos, casket draped in the flag that he had more than once told me that, in spite of all his suffering, he would serve under again and again.

Ever so precisely the men maneuvered the casket out of the hearse. Ever so precisely they carried it to the grave site. Ever so precisely they rolled it into place. Ever so precisely they stood back, turned, marched off.

The chaplain spoke a few words. The crowd recited the Lord’s Prayer. A few more words from the chaplain, and then another man in uniform precisely made his way to the casket, precisely and respectfully requested that all stand.

From across the way the commands were barked.

Rifles clicked. Fired.

Clicked. Fired.

To the right, men and women stood at full attention, their white-gloved right hands slowly making their way to a salute as the bugler slowly, precisely brought the instrument to his lips.

Ever so slowly, ever so precisely, ever so, dare I say, musically, he made his way up the major chord, each note clarion-like and yet not, both forceful, yet haunting.

He hit the final high sol easily, sustaining it just long enough, then made his way down the octave, perfect interval by perfect interval, until the final do filled the air, no vibrato, just tone, a good eight counts.

Porthos would have loved it.

As the guns were firing, the salutes lifting, the bugle playing, one uniformed soldier stood at the head of the casket, a second at its foot. As the final note of the song faded, the two men clicked into action, lifted the flag draping the casket, and ever so slowly, ever so precisely began to fold it, in half, in half again, then right triangle by right triangle.

Finally only one of the two men was left standing there, holding the folded flag, as Indiana’s highest-ranking National Guard officer walked slowly up to him. The man handed the General the flag, then saluted. He walked off.

And then it happened.

From behind the family, Athos stood and walked toward the General. At full attention, he put out his hands, and slowly the General lowered the flag into his, ending with a salute, older man to younger, both living and dead.

Athos then turned and made his way to stand in front of Porthos’ parents, to be met there by Porthos’ Uncle Jack, a Vietnam veteran whom Porthos had often spoken to me lovingly about, his inspiration for taking his energy, his mind, his body to serve, even knowing that death could result, by his hand, to his dearest friend, to himself.

Athos handed Jack the flag. And he saluted.

Jack nodded, turned, knelt down, and handed the folded flag finally to Porthos’ mother, his father right beside her.

Minutes later, the service was over.

People began to walk around, speak softly, hug. I looked over to see Athos embracing his fiancée, whom I’d only met for the first time the night before, a woman who’d been Porthos’ childhood buddy, the girl he’d taken to Prom “just because,” the woman who’d have never known Athos, whom Athos would have never known, would have never found comfort with, had it not been for that wisecracking charmer from Indiana.

Eventually I made my way over to him. He was standing next to Aramis’ brother-in-law: Aramis, the first of the Musketeers to die, in battle, the kid from the big family in Maryland, the man whose body Athos had lovingly guarded to his final resting place (Taking Him On Home).

Athos looked at me and swallowed. For a few seconds we stood there. The tear was trickling down his cheek. I think one was trickling down mine as well. I can’t quite remember.

Slowly he walked toward me, and once again boundaries evaporated. This time, though, I could feel the shaking of tears in his chest as he embraced me, not sobbing, just . . . tears.

“I’m not ready to let him go,” he finally whispered into my ear.

“I know,” I replied.

Slowly he pulled back. As we looked at each other, we both knew there was nothing left to say. He nodded, as did I. Then he turned away.

I wondered whether he was going to finish what he had to finish.

He did.

He’d told me the night before. “The last salute. That’s what’s going to be the hardest.”

I watched him as he went over to another man, his age, in full uniform. Briefly they spoke. Then, together, they walked up to the casket. People continued to walk around, speak softly, hug.

The two men assumed full attention. They looked down at the casket. Then, in a fashion just as the men and women had assumed at the sounding of “Taps,” just as the General had done to the flag and to him, Athos and his friend slowly began to raise their right hands to their foreheads, the entire journey from chest to brow extending over four, slow beats, at the end of which their hands stood still, as did Time, one last time.

Although not in heart, but at least in body, the last Musketeer had done it: had let his second brother go, had saluted him one last time at a casket, had taken his place, unwillingly, yet bravely, as the last one standing.

Slowly both men lowered their hands. Slowly they turned away—and then embraced.

About five minutes later, I turned to find him standing in front of me.

“You still in the hospital this week?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Maybe I could come by on Friday?”

“Of course.”

I think we both attempted something like a smile. That may be the best either of us can hope for. For a while.

Eventually it was time for me to go. I walked over to the casket and lowered the tips of the fingers of my right hand down onto it.

I, of course, had not earned to right to salute.

And so I thought what I needed to think, whispered what I needed to whisper.

Words that I now must write.

For I, too, don’t want to let Porthos go. And I, too, like Athos, must find a way to begin to do just that.

And so I type what I whispered to his body—perhaps, I hope, in some way even now whisper to him. Even though I could not salute him, I could say something, something that perhaps as his psychiatrist—and even more, as his somewhat boundary-bending friend—only I could say.

You see, I was by no means the only one to whom he bared the terrors and grief of his soul. He did to Athos. He did to his chaplain. He did to a few other buddies. Yet I do know that even with them, he’d only been able to graze against the guilt in his soul, the grief in his heart, the suffering in his mind.

With me, however, he had honored me enough with his trust to allow me to watch him begin to grasp those demons more firmly, to take the risk with him that everything could blow up, to have the faith that it wouldn’t, to feel together what never should have been felt by him in the first place.

Perhaps, then, there are words that only I can pronounce, not as some sort of blessing—far from it—but rather as a statement of fact, a “performative” utterance, as the literary critics are wont to say, words that by their very speaking both acknowledge what “is” and bring that “is”into being.

I have to laugh, actually. Porthos gave me no end of grief about being a “Harvard hot-shot.” He, more than anyone, would have enjoyed the ridiculousness of some Westside Indianapolis boy acting as if he could spout off some highfalutin’ Latin nonsense in the tradition of the Lux et Veritas so proudly displayed on anything Harvardian one can buy at the Coop in Cambridge.

Yet at the same time, sometimes I would wake up in the morning to find that he had texted me in the middle of the night to tell me that another nightmare had awakened him, shook him to the core, but that he was “going to be OK, Doc. I’m feeling a little better.” Why?

Because he’d watched a couple Harry Potter movies.

It was J. K. Rowling, of course, who helped make Latin fashionable again, with her spells, curses, and family names that hearken back to the language of Rome. How Porthos would have so appreciated, then, at least one word in the phrases, that wizarding word for a curse that could, if left unchecked, destroy both body and soul of any man or woman who had to endure it.

He knew something of that process, after all.

Yet, thankfully, he also knew of other processes as well. He knew, like Harry, that ultimately what saves us all is simply faithfulness and love.

I only hope that well within boundaries, yet well not constrained by them, he learned something of the latter two from me, enough so that I can say what I have to say, perhaps the only good I can see arising out the sadness sounded in that bugle’s call, in that beloved brother-in-arm’s salute.

And so one last time, now with fingertips touching wood only in spirit, I let you go, Porthos. As your doctor, I give you the final diagnosis to set you free.

Reporting for Duty, Sir

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Wife of USMCrazy shares her side of the story–and her devotion to her Marine husband and family.

The Pathway Home
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The Soldiers Project
An excellent referral source for private psychotherapists across the US who are willing to provide free, longer-term treatment services for combat veterans

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Note: By typing the initials "JD/rjsd," i.e., "John/Jane Doe's" and mine, I am signifying that the soldier about whom the essay is written has approved its content, received a copy, and given written permission for its publication on the blog.

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